tolga.i.uzuner at jpmorgan.com: >> charlist<-c("a","b","c") >> lapply(charlist, function (y) paste("'",y,"'")) Use 'sep=""'. And using 'sapply' instead of 'lapply' gives a nicer input. The following works. $ sapply(charlist, function(y) paste("'",y,"'", sep="")) a b c "'a'" "'b'" "'c'" -- Karl Ove Hufthammer